"[3][4] The Times Literary Supplement compared the English translation to The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

"[6] Saul Austerlitz, writing in The Boston Globe, called the work a comic novel, stating it was "an extended ruse ... [with] combat scrupulously at a distance".

[7] Set in Zagreb during 2003, Our Man in Iraq follows Toni, a journalist who is besieged by his rural relatives with requests for work.

Succumbing to his mother's nagging, Toni arranges for his cousin Boris to cover the ongoing U.S invasion of Iraq despite his lasting shell shock from the Croatian War of Independence.

Toni is forced to keep Boris's disappearance from his family and his newspaper while negotiating his own romantic, cultural and professional hurdles in a nation that is awkwardly progressing from socialism to global capitalism.